SEONGNAM — A decade into its venture, a Korean startup has been picked as a strategic partner by both Nvidia and Samsung SDS (018260), drawing attention across the country's venture industry. The company is Ndot Light, which has focused on a single field — three-dimensional image generation technology — since 2016. Its flagship product is Trinix, launched last year. Meeting at the company's office in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, on the 1st, CEO Park Jin-young described Trinix as "software that generates 3D computer-aided design, or CAD, files from natural-language commands or training images, much like using a generative artificial intelligence service."
Trinix has drawn particular interest in robot reinforcement learning. Training a robot's AI model requires a 3D virtual environment, and the equipment and objects that populate that environment must be created as 3D images. Because reinforcement learning cannot be completed with just one or two scenarios, developers need to produce large volumes of simulations quickly. Building each 3D file by hand makes progress impossible. With Trinix, a simple command generates the various 3D files needed to build robot training simulations. "Using Trinix, you can produce 2,000 3D files of industrial pellets in an hour," Park said.
The partnerships with Nvidia and Samsung SDS also came from recognition of what Trinix can do in robotics. This year, Ndot Light was named as a participant in a benchmark project for evaluating robotic hand movements, developed jointly by Nvidia and RealWorld. The company was also included on the list of 10 firms in Team REX, the consortium Samsung SDS assembled when it announced its robotics business. "Inquiries from companies wanting to use Trinix for robotics work started coming in during the second half of last year, and in the first half of this year those inquiries rose about tenfold from the preceding period," Park said.
Park did not set out to target the robotics value chain from the start. He had been developing a 3D image generation engine since 2016 and explored several businesses, including gaming. Trinix was first conceived as an aid for industrial design. "Trinix is the tool born when the 3D CAD engine Ndot Light spent a decade developing was combined with a large language model," Park said. "CAD files created in Trinix can be linked to professional design tools such as Autodesk and Siemens, which takes care of convenience in follow-up work."
Ndot Light's clients have been drawn to Trinix for cutting the hours required for early-stage design of mass-produced goods. Twenty companies currently use the software, including home appliance makers, shipbuilders and fashion accessory brands. "As a prime example of cutting design hours, one client entered a concept image and a prompt and succeeded in building the entire interior and exterior of a household air purifier as a CAD file in three minutes," he said.
Riding the momentum behind physical AI, Ndot Light aims to become a leading developer of 3D data generation technology for robotics. "Amid the global race in physical AI technology, we want Ndot Light to contribute significantly to Korea securing industrial leadership," Park said.
